For those who haven’t been paying attention, tell us a little bit about your background in online marketing.

My background is in good old fashioned offline marketing. I spent ten years in the betting industry, originally as a betting shop manager; then in retail marketing – sales promotion, point of sale etc; and latterly in telephone betting – direct mail – (yep snail mail!), advertising, etc.

Having spent my whole working life in betting I figured it was time for a change. I headed up the marketing team at a niche online job site for around a year before coming to my current agency, Gravytrain.

I still feel very new to the industry. But online marketing is just a different channel. Ultimately the same marketing principles apply. Marketing is about engagement not selling.

What areas of search marketing do you get involved in the most?

I’m not the most technical of people (I can’t even get my iPod to work), so I get involved mainly in strategy and leave the technical implementation to the people who know what they’re doing.

That aside I spend a good deal of time on content creation for clients – article writing, blogging etc; and manage some of our client’s PPC accounts which I really enjoy.

Where did they “Bo Banna” bit come from and do you think Ms Montana’s name was inspired by you?

*hangs head in shame*

It’s the name game – Hannah Bo Banna Banana Fanna Foe Fanna Fee Fie Moe Manna; or sometimes Hannah Bo Banna Stick a Lanna Fie Fanna Hannah.

I picked Hannah_Bo_Banna on some social networks because the infinitely more sensible Hannah_S was taken and I wanted something I could remember easily.

It’s a bit embarrassing when I introduce myself and feel the need to qualify that I am indeed Bo Banna ?

The people behind Ms Montana have a lot to answer for. It’s opened up a whole new world of pain for girls called Hannah across the globe – Hannah Banana was bad enough.

Had any other insurance companies spamming your blog recently?

Ha! Nope, I think that they’re steering clear of me now. I think in retrospect it was an honest mistake as I’ve not seen any evidence of it elsewhere and lots bloggers picked up the meerkat thang. Now I just get the regular spam.

Tell us a little about your theatrical endeavours.

Since 16 I’ve been a member of various amateur theatre groups in my local area. One such theatre group ask me back every now and again (even though it’s a youth theatre and strictly speaking I’m far too old).

I did a production of Crave by Sarah Kane this year, which we’re taking to the Woking Drama Festival; and I’m hoping to get cast in a production of Talking Heads by Alan Bennett (cross everything – including your eyes) which will be on in the Autumn.

You can often be found at LondonSEO events, commenting and posting on SEOmoz and of course on LeedsSEO. What are the best things you’ve learned from the SEO community?

As a complete novice I learnt pretty much everything I know from the kind and extremely patient peeps on SEOmoz and at the LondonSEO drink-a-thons. I love the share and share alike mentality of the people involved in the industry.

Best things? Probably Google Analytics tricks from RobBothan, tips to help solve international SEO problems from Lisa Myers (nee Ditlefsen), how best to deal with low quality content without losing rankings from Rob, Tom and the gang at Distilled.

A special mention also has to go to Rishi for being perhaps the most helpful person on the planet.

There’s tons more people who helped me over the last year and a half. You’re all fab.

How do you feel when Google offers up “gravy train lyrics” when you search for “gravy train”?

We’d have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that pesky band!

If you were a Simpsons character, which one would you be?

My brother would say I was most like chain-smoking Selma Bouvier, or perhaps Troy McClure the washed up actor. He’s very supportive

Tea or coffee?

Tricky. I drink both, but to be honest I don’t really like the taste of either. I like the taste of sugary milk. So latte’s rock, and when I make tea, I just show it the bag – if it looks like chicken soup – that’s perfect.

If the Internet was shutdown, what would you do?

Shutdown permanently? I’d get really good at pool, then hustle for a living.

What is your number one tip for people learning about online marketing?

Go get yourself involved – online and offline. SEOmoz is an amazing community, and the people there are incredibly generous. Once you’ve got to know people there, you can then start following them on twitter and other social networks. Likewise, go to the meet ups. It’s not nearly as scary as it might seem. Everyone’s very friendly.

Thanks for the great SEO.BIO-banna Hannah. If you’d like to get to know her better, why not follow her on twitter.

Duncan Morris

What was your path to setting up an Internet marketing company?

Duncan: Will and I have known each other since 1st year of secondary school. We became really good friends playing on the school basketball team and spent a lot of time discussing various crazy business ideas.

When were were in the 6th form we set up our first “business” along with a couple of friends. This was our first taste of PR. I don’t remember how it happened but we ended up with an article in the local paper talking about our new business. From that one article we got a number of clients.

From that point onward Will and I were always going to set up a business it was just a matter of when. On the advice of friends and family, we decided that we should both go to University and then try having ‘proper jobs’ for a few years, which we did.

Fast forward about three years when we decided that if we didn’t set up a business now we never would. WandD was born, specialising in web design for small businesses. To this day we still have a couple of these early clients.

The path from web design to internet marketing is probably familiar to most. After reading a lot about the subject and playing around with our own websites we started to offer internet marketing to our clients. From that point onwards things have been a bit of a blur.

Who came up with the name Distilled?

Duncan: We soon realised that WandD wasn’t the best name for our business. We wanted something short, easy to spell with an available domain name. We also wanted something that was in some way related to the two of us.

I think I came up with the idea of Distilled on the train heading home. Neither of us had an internet enabled mobile phone so we were just randomly saying words that we thought might still be available. Luckily for us distilled.co.uk was parked. And it’s connection to us? We love Scotch whisky!

Changing names was one of the hardest business decisions we have had to make. Anyone who has had to name a product or business will tell you that its easy to become attached to. It took us a long time, and one particularly stressful meeting, before we finally admitted how bad WandD was as a name.

We nearly didn’t end up being Distilled. At the time we didn’t have a huge amount of money and it was before we really knew the value of domain names. I think we ended up paying in the region of £700 for the domain, but if it had been much higher we may well have walked away.

What advice would you give to agencies looking to follow in your footsteps?

Duncan: I have 3 pieces of advice:

Firstly, network like your life depends on it. We have managed to grow from just the two of us to where we are today, almost entirely through networking. I’m not that good at it, but where I lack Will excels. (That’s the introvert in me, verses the extrovert in Will)

Secondly, follow your heart. When Will and I set up WandD / Distilled, I couldn’t have hoped for the level of success we have had. Part of me still wonders where we would be today if we’d have come back from South Africa and set up a company. I certainly don’t regret going to work for someone else, but I do often wonder where we’d be now if we had an extra four years head start.

Thirdly, find good people. We have an awesome team at Distilled and I think we have the balance just right between working hard and playing hard. It’s so satisfying to think that we have built a team who get on so well and who work so well. Finding the people we have and building our current team is without doubt the biggest success story so far.

Will Critchlow

How did your relationship with SEOmoz start?

Will: Like so many things separated by a continent and the Atlantic, it was virtual at first. SEOmoz was one of the places that Duncan and I spent a lot of time swapping ideas and learning during the early stages of growing our business. I gradually (accidentally?) became a prolific commenter there which meant that when Rebecca was coming over for her internship with Fresh Egg way back in late 2006 she recognised my name.

We caught up for a drink (and also met her boyfriend Jason who Tom and I would later play basketball with in Seattle).

We were gradually realising that our businesses had a lot in common in outlook and approach and so when a bunch of their team came to London for a conference, we made sure we all went for dinner and drank whisky. We became increasingly sure that there were benefits to working together given the similarity in outlook and the rest is history.

What is it like being a SEOmoz global associate?

Will: It’s great fun. The exposure of being given a blogging platform to talk to such a wide cross-section of the industry has been fantastic. I think the consulting work we have done together has brought really great benefits to the clients we have worked for.

The best bit, however, has been the chance for all of us to spend more time together. It’s great to be able to brainstorm products, swap tips (and let off steam about the pressures of growing a business) with people you like and trust.

Keep your eyes on the SEOmoz and Distilled blogs for announcements of some more cool stuff we have planned together for the middle and end of this year.

Has it brought you more business being associated with Rand and the team?

Will: Yes. We were getting introductions and referrals from them personally and via the “recommended list” (as was – now marketplace) before the formal “associate” status. Since then, we have worked together on a number of projects for large websites (Rand mentioned Scribd in his long post written recently when here for SMX) and we have a number of ongoing projects together including some PPC which wouldn’t normally have been a project SEOmoz would have taken on.

Do you think they will be expanding their associate program?

Will: That’s more a question for Rand. What we have put together is pretty special in my opinion – and I guess we’d be looking for something powerful to add to the mix if we were growing the consulting team.

Tom Critchlow

What has been the toughest challenge on any of your client projects?

Tom: I’m not sure there’s been any single project which I can highlight as the toughest.

One of the trickiest projects I worked on involved a 20 page document on duplicate content! Sometimes working with massive sprawling websites which cover international properties and multiple domains is a real headache to sort out, not only in terms of what the ‘right’ solution is but also what is actually feasible. Suggesting a client migrates 50+ websites onto one domain isn’t always the best thing to do from an ROI perspective even if it makes sense for SEO.

Some of the hardest projects are the ones where we only have limited control over the client’s website and so making changes/adding content is difficult. These projects are tricky because it often makes the whole process slower and also building links and getting rankings without creating content is much more difficult.

What is piece of SEO advice do you find yourself giving out most often?

Tom: Apart from “get more links” right? One of the things which I find myself repeating like a broken record is to fix tracking and analytics. I’m constantly amazed by how poor the tracking is on client websites, even on blue-chip businesses with multi-million pound online revenue streams. When I ask a question like “what percentage of your traffic comes from the UK?” or “how much revenue did your email marketing campaign generate?” I expect to be able to get the answer working with a company of any size but especially massive ones! And this holds true even (especially!) when clients have invested in hugely complicated analytics packages like omniture. Fixing your tracking should really be the thing you fix BEFORE you get SEO.

In the last month there has been a lot of buzz about canonical tag, ranking boosts for brands and twitter. Have any of these changed the advice you are giving to clients?

Canonical tag – nope. I’ve only mentioned it once to a client so far and not in a favourable way. The technology is far too young to really trust. I haven’t been able to test the outcome of the tag or how well Google is dealing with it yet so I don’t want to really recommend it. Also, there are almost always better technical solutions which don’t rely on this tag.

Ranking boosts for brands – This is very interesting but it’s not hit the UK or Europe yet (that I’ve seen). I’ve not given any specific advice yet – I imagine that it comes down to more links anyway so I don’t think it changes much

Twitter – I’ve definitely given twitter advice to clients and included twitter in the social media marketing mix. It’s a really powerful tool, particularly if you can find a way of putting out regular content. Regular twitter contests, for example, are powerful and can help your brand.

What other changes do you expect to see in the next six to twelve months?

Tom: Very difficult to say, but you’re asking me to speculate so here goes.

1) There’s been mutterings of upstream/downstream traffic information being used by Google. I wouldn’t be surprised if this came to be a recognised ranking factor at some point. Imagine if one of Google’s recommendations for a good website was “always leave it easy for users to get back to Google if they don’t like what they find”. That way you’re forced not to send them through a sneaky redirect etc otherwise google can slap you. Once you’ve got that Google can start using this data. It allows content to reign supreme once more and de-values the importance of links.

2) Conversion rate optimisation will become an industry in it’s own right with many more ‘conversion rate experts’ popping up all over the place.

3) Someone, somewhere, will figure out how to track one-box clicks separately from regular organic traffic (or Google will offer the data in analytics). Either that or the one-box will take over the whole page and there won’t BE anymore organic results.

Oh, and I think twitter will figure out a business model. As in a real one, not like facebook’s one which doesn’t make them any money. The web 2.0 world will be shocked and we’ll officially enter the world of web 3.0 – it’s like web 2.0 only with revenue.

Rob Ousbey

There is a great SEO community in London – how do you get involved and what do you get out of it?

Rob: Typically, I tend to see most of my local industry colleagues during events, such as the big search conferences in London. Rob Kerry has done a great favour to the industry by running the ‘London SEO‘ events, where I know I’ll always be able to catch up with people, and meet someone new. Beyond that, Twitter keeps me up to date and in touch with the other local SEOs.

The most valuable thing I get out of being involved in the community, is the reassurance that there are other real people doing similar jobs out there; knowing what they’re up to is great, as is sharing successes and horror stories that no one outside the industry would want to hear about. Also – since I have a habit of coming up with more ideas for sites and webapps than I have time to build – they make a good sounding board for new ideas; most SEOs I know in London are happy to give a very honest assessment of ideas & keep me off the wrong path.

What common SEO myth would you like put to bed?

Rob: I’m amused by forum threads about SEO being just something peddled by snake-oil salesmen, and have to resit the urge to bowl in and say “just try changing this and that aspect of your site, and see what happens to your rankings”.

If you want a specific SEO myth – I’d perhaps choose the belief that it takes a certain amount of time to get a site indexed by Google and ranking. Just last week I read someone saying that this could be at least six weeks. When I first launched www.HowLongUntilBeeroClock.com it was just a one page site, but it ranked #1 for it’s (admittedly obscure) brand name by that afternoon. Myth busted!

Do you see Google change the way it measures significance of sites based on links?

Rob: Google have said that they are constantly tinkering with the algorithms they use to rank web pages. There’s a continuous stream of blog posts by people who’ve seen what they perceive to be changes in Google’s assessments of significance, and although I’ve often seen things that suggest that something may have changed behind the scenes, we’ll never really know exactly what’s going on.

I don’t think there will be any fundamental changes to the way Google uses links to measure significance; I imagine that website owners will see a more significant effect from Google including additional blended news, local and product search results in to the user’s results page.

Lucy Langdon

I know you enjoy creating linkbait – have you found any particular type works best?

Lucy: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but online folk tend to be quite competitive, particularly when it comes to techy stuff. If you can offer linkbait that courts this kind of discussion then you’re on to a winner. In this vein, any kind of ‘expert’ advice will get you attention, either as admiration or disagreement. If you can’t do techy, do cute. Never underestimate the power of cute.

With Will & Tom having backgrounds in Maths, Rob engineering, and Lucy English, how do you think this shapes the search marketing group at Distilled?

Lucy: That’s an easy question to answer: it makes us invincible!

Seriously though, having a range of skills is really helpful. When we bounce ideas off each other, I think we get a much more holistic response than we would if we were all of the same stock. We work quite closely together and will use each other’s various areas of expertise to complement whatever we’re working on.
But beyond that, we’re a lot more similar than we are different. We all find a lot of the same stuff funny, share a lot of similar work ethics and socialise together outside of work.

Will has a cooking site, Rob has various websites and Tom has been dabbling in affiliate marketing, Lucy please tell me you do something offline in your spare time.

Lucy: I’m actually having a bit of an offline hobby boom at the moment! A certain young man gave me a few guitar lessons for Christmas so I’m just getting into that in a big way. I also play the clarinet, bake, draw a bit and am learning Spanish on my way to work in the morning. The big one is creative writing though. I’m working on some new stuff which I really want to put onto a blog at some point in the next few months. For the record though, the boys have lots of other hobbies: Will plays basketball, Rob plays squash and everyone knows Tom’s a ninja.

I’d like to thank the whole team for sparing the time to answer my quesions. I seriously recommend that, if you are not already, you should follow the Distilled bunch on Twitter.